When you search on Bing, sometimes instead of seeing an ordered list of search results, you might see search results broken up into categories. For example, if you search for “Virginia,” your search results start off with an image and link to the state web site, as well as a map. You then see [...]

If you search for the word “cold” and you’re using the search box for a health related site, chances are you want to find out something about the illness. If you search for “cold” at Google or Yahoo or Bing, there’s a chance that you might be interested in weather or airconditioning or a [...]

StreetViews indoors? Not long ago, Google started inviting businesses to apply to have Google Photographers film the insides of their businesses. But what if those photographers showed up with something like this:

The news of Google’s acquisition of Quiksee, also known as Mentorwave Technologies Ltd., is spreading around the Web, and most [...]

“SEO is Dead,” is something that you may have seen grace the headlines of a blog post or news article in the past few years.

Some have pronounced SEO as being dethroned by Social Media Optimization (or Social Media Marketing). Or that Personalized Search, or Google Instant, or Universal Search, or Google Caffeine, [...]

If you were asked to point out the patent that describes PageRank, and you went searching at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), you might quickly get confused. A little more confusion comes today, with the granting of a new patent on PageRank to Stanford University. I’ve also located the very first PageRank [...]

In 2005, Google’s John Lamping was a guest speaker giving a presentation titled On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog (pdf) to a class at Berkeley on the Quality of Information. In his talk he asked and answered questions such as:

Historically, search engines have ranked web pages in search results based upon a combination of an information retrieval (IR) score based upon a matching of terms in a query to terms in a document, as well as a linked based score that calculates the quality and quantity of links pointing to a page, based [...]

Imagine that Google assigns categories to every webpage or website that it visits. You can see categories like those for sites in Google’s local search. Now imagine that Google has looked through how frequently certain keywords appear on the pages of those websites, how often those pages rank for certain query terms in search [...]

Is Facebook targeting conventional and social ads to the social network’s users and their connections, based upon visits to pages outside of Facebook that show Facebook widgets or use Facebook tracking pixels, while the Facebook users are logged out of Facebook?

On Sunday, Australian tech developer Nik Cubrilovic wrote a post titled, Logging [...]

Last Thursday, the Wall Street Journal published a couple of articles that point to a new direction in the future from Google, With Semantic Search, Google Eyes Competitors, and Google Gives Search a Refresh. On Friday, Barry Schwartz reported at Search Engine Land that Google’s Head of Spam, Matt Cutts announced that Google was [...]